He has apprenticed many now-famous directors, stressing the importance of budgeting and resourcefulness; Corman once joked he could make a film about the fall of the Roman Empire with two extras and a bush.

Career

Until his so-called "retirement" as a director in 1971 (he continued to produce films even after this date) he would produce up to seven movies a year; his fastest film was perhaps The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which was reputedly shot in two days and one night (supposedly, he had made a bet that he could shoot an entire feature film in less than three days; another version of the story claims that he had a set rented for a month, and finished using it with three days to spare, thus pushing him to use the set to make a new film). This claim is disputed by others who worked on the film, who have called it part of Corman's own myth-building. Quite a number of his films, such as Last Woman on Earth (1960), contain elements of science fiction.